


|out of the darkness and into the light|

by littlekaracan



Category: Ranger's Apprentice - John Flanagan
Genre: (the most important tag), Gen, also there's a brief mention of suicide which doesn't really happen so please watch out for that, and i'm a slave to my impulses sooo, bittersweet ending because i couldn't end it in a completely angsty way, but not Explicit death, death here, halt o'carrick smiles, my brain went "oh shit what if crowley had cataract before his death", not really stating this as cralt but i'm not the person to say how you should read my fics lmao, ok so this is mostly angst with some emotional fluff in the middle, we're not savages in this house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-13 00:10:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16881897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlekaracan/pseuds/littlekaracan
Summary: Crowley’s eyes had always looked more like a bird’s than a human’s, staring right through anyone he was talking to, bright and sharp and, in some instances, plain disturbing. Now they were everything but, and Halt found that more unsettling than he ever did the vivid stare. The tick-off was the fact that the direction Crowley’s eyes were looking in was slightly off, eyeing the wall right next to Halt rather than his face.The dark pupils were clouded, white fog seeping into the hazel, and, in a single chilling instant, Halt understood.“You’re going blind.”Crowley only smiled.





	|out of the darkness and into the light|

**Author's Note:**

> i literally didn't read rr because i was sad. i couldn't even read crowley's wikia page because i was sad. so here, have some shit angst. merry sadmas

Halt came to Crowley’s home early in the morning by his request, having left his own while the sun was only shyly starting to seep over the horizon. Normally he would’ve stalled a few hours, unsure if the host was awake, perhaps he would’ve joined Pauline on a walk. But if anyone was an early riser, it was Crowley, and Halt never made him wait.

Before he could raise his hand to knock, a familiar voice came from inside with silent happiness that had been reflecting on Crowley’s face the last few months for one small reason or another.

“Come in.”

So he did, and the door didn’t creak as it usually would. Glancing around the place, Halt kicked off his shoes – the floor was oddly clean, as if Crowley hadn’t been outside for a few days. His eyes quickly got used to the warm tones of the wooden walls, and only then did he notice Crowley himself, sitting cross-legged at his table, red braids hanging from the unshaved side of his head and covering his face. No wonder he liked Gilan – they both had a talent for blending into their surroundings, even if Crowley was more known for his silent movement.

“Hey,” Halt greeted, and Crowley only jerked his head down in acknowledgement.

“Close the door, if you will,” he asked, and Halt complied, watching him in the corner of the eye. He was writing something, undoubtedly, the tip of a scribbling quill twitching up and down between his fingers. Paperwork, perhaps, or a letter. Either way, if he wanted to finish it before making time for Halt, it must’ve been important.

Halt quietly pulled a second chair from behind the table and sat next to Crowley, watching him write without interruption. Soon enough he heard a sigh of frustration, and Crowley pushed the quill away, resting his head against the crest rail of the chair.

“To think I tried to wake up earlier and finish this before you got here…” he snorted, gesturing vaguely toward the paper. “And you still beat the odds. Say, do you plan to better yourself forever?”

“Maybe you’re getting slower,” Halt said, a small smile tugging at his lips. Crowley, unfortunately, seemed to take his mockery seriously, humming in thought.

“Maybe I am.”

“Come on.” He clicked his tongue. The one time he makes a joke, and he manages to nail it home. Great. “What’d you need me for?”

“Hm.” Crowley straightened his back, pulling the paper he was writing on back to him with two fingers and lightly brushing his hand against the ink. “Well, when it comes down to it, I just wanted to see you.”

Halt quirked an eyebrow, eyeing the back of Crowley’s head. They’d talked during the Gathering not too long ago, so he thought there was some serious matter.

”Why?” Crowley didn’t answer. It seemed like didn’t move, either. Faced with a moment of silence, Halt suppressed a chuckle. “Don’t tell me you’re growing sentimental.”

Crowley’s laughter was dry, and it ended as abruptly as it started. “You’re not one to lecture me about sentiment. I didn’t risk my leaf by chasing a ship to Skandia just because one of my apprentices managed to get himself captured, so don’t curl your lip at me.”

‘Get himself captured’ didn’t sit well with Halt, considering the fact that what Will did was nothing less than stupidly brave, but he decided to swallow it.

“That was years ago.”

“You’re right,” Crowley agreed, hands raised peacefully. “Will’s grown up, hasn’t he?”

“If you try to get me to feel emotional about my own apprentice, I’ll punch you.” There was no real bite to his words. Yes, Will was no boy anymore, and so what? Gilan was his own person as well – it was the in nature of teaching. A mentor will have to let his students go eventually.

“I will politely decline your offer.” Crowley finally brushed his hair off his face as if he hadn’t felt it there before and beckoned Halt closer. “Come on, I wanted you to see something.”

Halt approached, curious, and couldn’t help but glance at the paper on the table, upon doing which he squinted, unsure what to make of what he noticed. It was an odd little detail; Crowley’s handwriting wasn’t exactly ever all that neat, but now it looked like a child had rushed across the paper – the letters went up and down wildly, and in some places words were cut off and continued an inch or so away.

Crowley had probably noticed him looking and slipped the paper into a niche under the table, smiling thinly.

“Yeah, that too.” He sighed, turning to face Halt, whose eyebrow involuntarily went up again. “But there was something else. And you’re observant. Figure it out, eh?”

Halt stared him up and down, waiting for clarification, but Crowley just shrugged his shoulders.

That’s when he noticed it. Crowley’s eyes had always looked more like a bird’s than a human’s, staring right through anyone he was talking to, bright and sharp and, in some instances, plain disturbing. Now they were everything but, and Halt found that more unsettling than he ever did the vivid stare. The tick-off was the fact that the direction Crowley’s eyes were looking in was slightly off, eyeing the wall right next to Halt rather than his face.

The dark pupils were clouded, white fog seeping into the hazel, and, in a single chilling instant, Halt understood.

“You’re going blind,” he said, feeling the words run a shiver up his spine. Crowley only smiled.

“Quick,” he observed, turning back to his table. There was some kind of masked emotion he was hiding in his grin, but he was a ranger and he hid it too well. “Or maybe just obvious. Either way, you’re no less sharp.”

Halt opened his mouth to say something, but any convenient words had escaped him. The serenity in Crowley’s tone must’ve meant that he’s known this for quite some time now. He wrapped one of his slimmer braids around his finger, looking away, nowhere in particular.

“Everything goes blurry, “ he said. Halt sat back down, having suddenly lost the energy to keep standing. “Most of the time it’s just certain spots that don’t feel right. I can still somewhat make things out, but…” His fingers trailed up into his own hair, and, despite the calm in his voice, Halt could feel his horror as if it was physically there. “I think that it’s only a matter of time until I lose my sight completely.”

“Crowley, I-“ He cut himself off abruptly. Crowley never wanted others to pity him, nothing had changed. _If there’s something I can do, tell me, if there isn’t, shut it,_ he’d say. But there was nothing he could do. There was nothing either of them could do. Some things simply came with age.

“I compared myself to Cropper a few days ago,” Crowley said, his tone gone a bit sour. Granted, he missed his horse. All rangers missed the horses that’d retired. He remembered the looming sadness on Will’s face for days after the wolf had attacked Tug. “I remembered how he grew old. How he became slower, less energetic. I visited him, you know- and he was different.”

Halt involuntarily thought of Abelard who stood outside, waiting for his companion, probably lazily listening to the songs of early birds, and gave a hum of sympathy.

“He could barely move.” Crowley kept on talking, although it clearly wasn’t a dear memory to him. Halt let him speak. “He recognized me, but he didn’t walk with me. I couldn’t hear a word. And, Halt, I was so scared that’d be the last time I’d see him. I didn’t know how to bid goodbye.”

Halt had an awful tug in his stomach. He knew where this was going. He always knew what Crowley was on about, and it was no different. He only wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear it.

“Do you think horses know when they’re about to go?” Crowley threw his head over the crest rail, looking somewhere near Halt. The upside-down face looked thoughtful.

Halt took a breath. Better for him to get it out rather than go circles around it.

“Do you?”

The words lingered between them, swallowed by the cold air. Crowley was silent for a second, the corners of his lips tugging up. He straightened his back, facing away.

“There’s nothing to know,” he admitted, fidgeting with a single dark ring on his finger absent-mindedly. “It’s more of a feeling. And you can’t just brush that off.”

Again, Halt didn’t know how to respond. He thought little of death, he didn’t anticipate it nor dread it. When he lay poisoned years ago with Will and Horace silently strategizing and hoping for his recovery somewhere near, fear wasn’t his natural response. He thought of ways he could be useful, plans to offer the ranger and the knight watching over him, maybe a piece of tactical advice or another, if he had the strength to utter it. But Crowley wasn’t going on many missions anymore, and so one of the only things he could do to eat up time was, ironically, the paperwork he so despised.

“It’s a common practice for rangers, isn’t it?” Halt finally said, his voice a little too quiet to be emotionless. ”Making peace with your inevitable death.”

Crowley chuckled. “Which is why I’m not scared of it.”

“And when Thorgan’s men put you down fourty years ago, were you not scared of it either?” Halt asked innocently. Crowley snapped his head at him, and his foggy eyes glimmered.

“Oh, by no means.” Tension left his shoulders as he rocked in the chair slowly, undoubtedly remembering the unfortunate incident that left him complaining about a bruise under his eye for three weeks straight. “I held out fairly well, you know.”

Halt rolled his eyes, slouching in his chair as well. “When I saw you, they looked like they were going to tear you apart. No- they looked like they’d almost finished the process.”

“…Touché.” Crowley shrugged, grinning sheepishly. “Oh, but still. You were there. Should’ve seen your own face. Maybe there was blood in my eyes, but I swore to tell you about your uncanny resemblance to some kind of spirit of havoc. I thought they’d take off running just after noticing you.”

“They never take off running.”

“That they don’t. It’d probably only make your job harder, chase them down and all.”

“ _Our_ job,” Halt corrected. Crowley nodded, the gesture somewhat bittersweet.

“Not for long, now.”

“Don’t say that.”

Crowley blinked through something in his eyes and sighed, making an attempt to focus on Halt’s face.

“Halt, my eyes might be on the verge of collapse, but my mind isn’t. I’m not trying to sadden you, I’m telling you that, after knowing you all my life, I’m not going to betray myself and leave you with a miserable shadow of me.” He shifted in the chair, fully facing Halt. Suddenly Halt saw his eyes brighten, even if just the slightest bit, but they looked brown and sharp and focused as they always were, staring straight through him, light crinkling in the iris. “When my time comes, I’ll go, _have mercy_ , I’ll go. Few of us look death straight in the face and say “no, thank you, I think I’ll stay in the hall before the courtroom for a bit more” like you during your little mishap after Clonmel, eh?”

The light died down as abruptly as it surfaced.

“If there’s one thing I’ll do, it’s saving myself from helplessness. I’m not about to let my own body take away my senses.” Crowley slouched unnaturally, simply looking unusually tired. Halt looked on, watching his oldest friend’s eyes drift slightly above his shoulder. “And if it means I’ll have to go before my time because I won’t be able to tell day and night apart, I’ll do it.”

“It wouldn’t be the end of your life,” Halt tried for the last time, even though he suspected Crowley wasn’t speaking on a whim and had made his decisions quite some time before he arrived. “Nobody would take you for less, even if you were blind.”

“I’m sure. But, Halt, I’ve spent my whole life making sure we can at least somewhat live in the light.” He could hear Crowley’s voice break just a bit before he masked it by clearing his throat. “I won’t have my last memory be of darkness.”

Halt found himself unable to speak for a few seconds. Crowley sounded so monotonous, almost as if he was talking about the weather. He wasn’t used to his friend talking about serious matters so lightly. When he finally found his tongue, he wouldn’t mention Crowley’s attitude. It was not his choice to make, after all.

“You did a good job.”

Crowley smiled again, and it seemed that he’d finished saying everything he wanted to. “Something tells me you’d say that even if Morgarath was currently king and the Corps were a bunch of meekly cut-throat bandits.”

“You know damn well I wouldn’t.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” His shoulders shook with muffled laughter. “Something nowadays makes people give away their pity to every single stranger that might not even need it. You have no idea.”

“Judging by the paper pile on your table, you really could use some.”

He glanced to his side – admittedly, a bit to the right of the aforementioned pile.

“Even in death, I can’t avoid paperwork,” he said dryly, and Halt rolled his eyes at the, well, joke, somewhat, if he could call it that.

“All this talk and you’re still not dead yet.”

“No, that I am not.” Crowley jabbed his finger at the paper. “Which is why I haven’t escaped the devil’s quill. Ah, well. I’ve eaten up enough of your time as it is.”

Halt shook his head without even thinking. They were friends, believe it or not, they held great affection toward one another, and he almost wanted to remind Crowley of that. He was not ‘eating up his time,’ whatever he was doing. In the end, he wouldn’t have protested against his ‘just wanted to see you’, either.

Crowley had already taken to the first paper, however, the quill once again dancing between his fingers. Halt watched, knowing the letters to be too squished or too stretched, but he didn’t comment on it.

He should probably say goodbye, the voice in his head suggested, but, strangely, he found himself living Crowley’s words: he really didn’t know how to. How do you say goodbye to a friend who, in summary, just told you they were going to go soon, whether involuntarily or on their own accord? It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t bewildering.

“Going anywhere soon?” Crowley’s voice startled him. He probably decided that Halt hadn’t gone away without a word, or maybe he just didn’t hear him go. One of the perks of being the most silent ranger was that you could hear everyone else. “Missions? Fairs?”

“No,” Halt replied. “ _You_ didn’t give me any missions. I’m staying within a few hours of travel on horseback, you know.”

“Of course.” Crowley hummed absent-mindedly. He was pressing the quill too hard. “Even though writing you a letter will probably take me twice the time it had taken you to get here.”

“I’d say it’d be worth it,” Halt said, only partly joking.

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t be.”

His eyes shifted toward the open window, away from Crowley’s back. Sun was slowly beginning to rise, fiery rays of red warming the cold breeze that’d been flowing in from the outside. Crowley raised his head too, squinting at the light with a half-smile stretching his lips.

“Say hello to Abelard for me, won’t you? And to Will, when you see him.”

“One of the two probably heard you through that window.” Halt finally rose up from his seat. Maybe no goodbye was really necessary. After all, sometimes even words were unneeded for him and Crowley. They knew each other too well.

Crowley heard the floor creak, and understood.

“Write if you see something interesting,” he turned to look, tapping a finger just under his eyes, lips pressed together. “Because I sure as hell will miss it.”

He made a jokingly upset face, and Halt stifled his laughter.

The sun found shelter between the strands of Crowley’s braids, blurring the lines between him and the wall even further. He seemingly fell into thought, his eyes slowly drifting away as he unconsciously bit the end of the quill. When he started humming again, Halt recognized the song.

Silently, he sighed and, glancing over his shoulder one last time, closed the door behind him, hearing Crowley’s voice grow a bit louder when Halt wasn’t there to accuse him of being an annoyance. _Him and his singing_.

The tune went on in his head as he rode back. Abelard stayed silent, unwilling to question it.

 

* * *

 

 

They found him smiling, they said. His eyes were open, stuck stubbornly to the ceiling, and he was smiling.

Halt felt like his entire body was stiff, like he couldn’t even move normally. Sitting outside, he tried to coax his breathing into what resembled a more regular pace. Even if his mind was blank, even if he could force himself to think about nothing, his eyes were still itching.

He never found it easy to bow to the rules of nature, and now it was more difficult than he could’ve thought.

Abelard stayed somewhere close, even if Halt couldn’t see him from where he was. When Halt didn’t acknowledge his silent snort, he tried a soft nicker.

“It’s okay,” Halt assured. But his voice was hoarse.

He hadn’t been left in the dark completely. There was a note written by an unmoving hand inbetween his fingers. They’d hurried to bring it to him when he was on his way out, vision still clouded by the news. The dark ink was long-dry, but it had seeped through to the other site of the paper when the writer held the quill a bit too firmly. Inside rested only three simple words, unrelated to everything they’d talked about and, at the same time, so familiar it hurt.

_“Consider David’s son.”_

It was in letters tidier than even Crowley’s normal handwriting, not smudged and not drooping. He read through a couple of times, just three words drawn so surely they might’ve as well been from the past. As Halt carefully tucked the paper behind one of the tight belts on his scabbard, he, strangely, found himself resisting a small simper. 

How unlike Crowley it would be to write anything else than advice in his last hours, how unlike him it would be to try and be anything less than useful.

How much like him it was to throw away all sentiment and trust Halt to know what he meant and what he suggested. How much like him it was to feel like he knew Halt enough to know he didn’t need goodbyes or last words, and for him to be so right.

And when the empty seat at the Gathering was finally taken by Halt’s first apprentice, Halt swore he could see the familiar glint in Gilan’s eye.

When the usual chatter began, he swore he heard roaring laughter roll over their heads and disappear in the blood red fire.

It slowly rose up into the light.

Halt watched it fly, smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! i hope it gave you the Emotion Feelsies
> 
> edit: ok so sb told me the note thing was weird, why not just call him gilan, why go for the full david's son, and i fully accept that it's hella vague lmao. my original thinking was: the note can always end up in the wrong hands, it's official ranger paper, it's important, people might figure out the corps are weakened by the loss of their command, they don't have a new one yet in place etc etc. and crowley's a careful person. i'm sure there are more davids in araluen than gilans. that was all thank u for reading my essay


End file.
